Cold Inside: Sexual Climate Change
People are having less sex. Even before the pandemic, social distancing, and masturbatory Zoom-bombing, far less sex. We’ve long imagined a sexually sterile future, from the dystopian visions of Brave New World, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale to the more recent, controversial novel by Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island (La Possibilité d’une île), in which humans have engineered sexuality out of their reproduction, enabling them to exist in individual compounds with no physical, and virtually no social, interaction. Now a version of this future seems almost here: the numbers of people engaging in consensual sexual relations is falling while slavery, driven by sexual exploitation, continues to rise. This is why, along with the many ongoing political and ecological crises that we’re already losing sleep over—climate change and the rising consumption of resources, institutional racism and state sanctioned violence, the rise in global fascism and misogyny—we should be alarmed that people are having less sex. Desexualization expresses an underlying breakdown of social feeling,
